Broadcom Corp., which has invented an automotive technology known as BroadR-Reach Ethernet, definitely believes so. The leading networking chip company, although still a novice in the automotive market, thinks carmakers are coming around at last to the wisdom of leveraging standard technologies such as Ethernet -- already well proven outside the car market.

Indeed, when BMW rolls out its X5 SUV later this year, champagne corks will be popping at Broadcom. The German carmaker -- in partnership with Freescale Semiconductor, a licensee of Broadcom's BroadR-Reach Ethernet technology -- will become the first OEM to commercialize the Ethernet for a 360-degree camera parking assist system.

In a recent interview with EE Times, Ali Abaye, senior director of product marketing for Broadcom's Infrastructure and Networking Group, claimed, as the amount of electronics rapidly grows inside a car, "Carmakers have come to a collective conclusion" to embrace automotive Ethernet. "They don't want another proprietary technology," he added.

Three reasons
Abaye listed three reasons why automakers are unclenching.

First, carmakers today are "paying more attention to what electronics devices their customers are bringing into the car -- moreso than a car's horsepower." They need to make sure their cars can accommodate everything from a navigation system to displays and other gizmos consumers use inside a car. "And this is not just for a high-end car," said Abaye.

Second, there are many "islands of networks" inside a car today, he said. Each automotive network technology such as low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS), media-oriented systems transport (MOST), and the controller area network (CAN), is connected to different electronics. They don't interoperate. "That is adding to the bottom line for carmakers," Abaye said.

Third, carmakers need scalable solutions for in-car networking. The quality of camera technology used for lane changing, for example, is running at higher data rates. With the use of tablets and smartphones, consumers audio-visual quality expectations are intensifying. As cars get connected to the external world through WiFi, 3G, 4G, and LTE, the bandwidth needed for in-car networking grows exponentially. "For scalable, ubiquitous, reliable, and useful" in-car networking, Abaye said, carmakers are now increasingly looking to OPEN Alliance SIG, an open industry consortium designed to encourage wide-scale adoption of Ethernet-based networks as the standard in automotive networking applications.

Cable Comparison

The MOST auto connectivity spec is on the way out as new unshielded single twisted-pair cable arrives for automotive Ethernet (compare it with regular Ethernet cable on the left). This means auto makers can leverage the ubiquitous Ethernet standard while reducing the connectivity cost and cabling weight.

Debate on Ethernet backbone
Broadcom is convinced that the Ethernet will become the electronic backbone in cars. In Abaye's mind, the use of automotive Ethernet for such applications as infotainment and camera-assisted parking with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is almost a given. Automotive Ethernet will challenge LVDS and MOST, Abaye said. "We will start seeing automotive Ethernet replacing CAN in eight to 10 years." Noting the different network islands that don't interoperate in cars today, Abaye said, "These islands do not need to exist."

Given the slow-moving nature of the automotive industry, though, how soon the automotive Ethernet will really infiltrate cars -- and in what volume -- remains a topic of heated debate. Opinions are sharply divided even among automotive industry analysts. Forecasts of the number of Ethernet nodes used by the automotive industry by 2020 range from 120 million to 300 million units.

On one end of the spectrum, Frost & Sullivan's Telematics and Infotainment program manager Praveen Chandrasekar told EE Times, "By 2020, there will be more than 100 to 120 Ethernet ports in a luxury car owing clearly to drivers' increasing use of cameras for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), automated driving requiring high level sensor fusion and increasing infotainment content." Chandrasekar added, "On the other hand, more than 50 to 60 ports will be in a volume [mass-market] car because of similar reasons. This almost amounts to a total of 300 million Ethernet ports globally and the highest contributing markets will be North America and Europe."

While you are at it you might want to see what technology they are planning on using. Switched Ethernet is pretty much all that is being used today, but shared backbone media might significantly simplify the wiring. At a minimum I could see multiple localized switches. You are not going to want 100 ports on a single switch!

100 year old "Early American antique" cars grace our highways from time to time; will it be possible to maintain the current generation of cars in a century?

DrQuine, I haven't even thought about it before...but it's true. With all these complexity (and not to mention, "islands" of different proprietary nteworking technologies proliferated in cars over time), we may never see cars today being trotted out on highways 100 years from now!

The obligation of auto manufacturers to maintain spares and repair capabilities for vehicles during their likely lifetime gets much complex with yearly changes in networking systems. By the time security upgrades are included (the dozens that Microsoft feels compelled to provide to my computer), the configuration control for a car will become an absolute nightmare. I think it is time to standardize and simplify. 100 year old "Early American antique" cars grace our highways from time to time; will it be possible to maintain the current generation of cars in a century?

There are a couple questions we need to ask ourselves prior to putting Ethernet in a car.

1) How many devices needs to be connected?

2) Do the devices need to talk to each other?

3) Do the existing techologies serve the purpose?

4) How is the wiring done?

5) Where is the Ethernet Switch going to be?

There is an advantage of direct connectivity - 1 fewer device; 1 less uncertainity. Who wants to see a blinking dashboard when the Ethernet switch goes down?

I agree Infotainment is one of the key drivers to the wired automobile. Nowaday, kids are enjoying their cartoon shows and browsing their social network sites in the backseat with their connected tablet. Does Ethernet wired automobile add value to the Infotainment push?

On the other hands, if Ethernet wired automobile is demanded, I believe BroadR-Reach is a superior technology to the job. I learned about the technology in a couple years ago that it can serve with 2 wires (twisted or parallel). The fact that it has high noise rejection ability will definitely fit the environment of any vehicles.

@amagnani, your points are well taken. Actually such efforts as brining in Wi-Fi to wirelessly connect consumer devices (brought into a car) with a backseat display, for example, are already happening.

But carmakers do have immediate needs for a bigger bandwidth networking technology, for example, to accomodate more than several cameras already installed inside a car for driver assistance. These embedded vision cameras will be streaming video in parallel in real time. LVDS won't cut it.

When you look at designs of future cars, you need to consider networking technologies that can scale. That's I think where Ethernet comes in.

The comments to this article thus far point towards two areas which are important: the physical layer (PHY, cables, etc.) and the higher level protocol (software) layers that ride on top of Ethernet. The part in the middle ("Ethernet") is not being affected.

The automotive industry identified several challenges that need to be overcome to make the whole system be suitable for automotive applications. On the physical layer are discussions ongoing on the required bandwidth and speed, resulting in discussions about both 100 Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s. And which existing or new PHY solutions could support these communication speeds and meet the automotive EMC, power consumption and cost requirements at the same time. OPEN SIG, IEEE RTPGE and JASPAR are just three examples of consortia that focus on this aspect. For the higher level software is also discussion ongoing about topics like AVB, TSN (Time Sensitive Networks) and profiles. Involved consortia are for example AVnu, AUTOSAR, JASPAR.

All in all enough hurdles that need to be overcome to justify the careful remarks of some of the people who were interviewed in the article.

At least such isolation will prevent the car hackers from taking control of the Car . A CAN network will control the vital systems of the Car such as ECU, braking etc and these systems can remain out of reach for the hackers.